Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode eighty of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:1b.”1 We are continuing our series on the book of Jonah, using the tools from our Amateur Toolbox.2 (As a reminder, if you’re interested in digging deeper, the script for each episode can be found at my website – amateurexegete.com – and they include endnotes that offer citations and further discussion.) In the last episode, covering the first half of Jonah 1:1, we noted that the opening of the book looks rather abrupt, as if we are joining the story as it's already underway.

Dan McClellan responds to "proof" that Jesus is God, especially in relationship to the Trinity. Brent Nongbri reviews The Gospel according to Hobby Lobby by Michael Blanding. Looks to be another interesting work covering the Green family. Robyn Walsh talks about publishing in antiquity. Mark Goodacre queries whether the beloved disciple was from Jerusalem. If you see Heather Thiessen on the street, …

Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 2:xlv-xlvi: Although David is clearly represented as a divinely elected king in , he is also seen quite strikingly in all his human weakness, in his relentlessness, and in his moral ambiguity - hardly a figure of royal propaganda. And in regard to the issue of historical causation, events here are the consequence of human actions - in the preponderance of these stories, there is nothing miraculous and no divine intervention.

"[H]e thought of Carol on the day her mother had taken all of them to Savin Rock. His friend Bobby had won some money from a three-card monte dealer that day and Carol had worn her blue bathing suit on the beach and sometimes she'd give Bobby that look, the one that said he was killing her and death was sweet.

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-nine of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:1a.”1 Perhaps you’ve seen a nursery painted with murals of stories from the Bible. On one wall stands a rosy-cheeked Noah, his wife by his side, and a boat full of elephants, bears, giraffes, and – if the nursery was painted by Young Earth Creationists – a few dinosaurs.

"Baby, they's justice and they's mercy. If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don't hurt nearly like bad justice, and always remember, the Eye of God can see." - Allen Levi, Theo of Golden…

Steve Mason, "Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts?" in On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and Early Christian Literature, edited by Joseph Verheyden, John S. Kloppenborg, Geert Roskam, and Stefan Schorn (Peeters, 2022), 231. To sum up this section: the several puzzles of Acts 21,38 – (1) that Luke would choose Latin sicarii for Judaean militants, (2) that he should locate them out in the desert rather than in the city, and (3) that he should place the Egyptian at their head – are not well solved by imagining another source that made such a combination.

"You need to stop clinging to the notion that there's only one right path. You'll waste half your time panicking you're not on it, and the rest backtracking to find it." - Joe Abercrombie, The Devils (Tor Publishing, 2025), "Reverses." What did Jesus look like? No idea, Robyn Walsh observes. And the Gospels' silence on the matter is, as she intimates, striking.

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-eight of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “A Feeding Miracle, Bethsaida, and Undesigned Coincidences.”1 In her 2017 book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts,2 philosopher Lydia McGrew makes the argument that the reason Jesus asks Philip in John 6:6 where they can find bread to feed the five thousand is because, Luke’s version of the story tells us (Luke 9:11), the miracle happened at Bethsaida, the city the Johannine Evangelist reports was the town from which Philip hailed (John 1:44).

Mark Goodacre. The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025. Paperback. $29.99. Pp. 205. ISBN 9780802875136. That Matt. and Luke knew and made use of the Gospel of Mark is pretty much the consensus among New Testament scholars.1 But what about the Gospel of John? Did its author also utilize Mark?

We often hear of and talk about the "Gnostics." But how accurate and useful is the term? Robyn Walsh addresses this in a recent video.

Annalisa Phillips Wilson, "Those 'in the Lord' Are Free: 1 Corinthians 7 and a Stoic Paradox," JTS 76 (2025), 466-467. In verse 22, Paul says that the slave who has been called is the Lord’s freedman (ἀπελεύθερος), a statement that echoes the well-known paradox of the ‘free slave’. The notion of a sage who, through his virtue, maintained metaphorical freedom while legally enslaved arises in numerous texts, as seen below, and is especially associated with Stoic teaching.

Patrick J. Hartin, James, SP 14 (Liturgical Press, 2009), 80. Not only does James show himself to be heir to the traditions of Israelite wisdom, he is also heir to the way in which Jesus appropriated the Israelite wisdom traditions. Like Jesus, James shows a decided concern for and identification with the poor. Witherington identifies James as a "sage from below" (165).

Michael B. Hundley, "What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 1: The Divine Cast of Characters," ANE Today 13.7 (July 2025). Most assume that angels (literally messengers) are not gods, using the circular argument that they cannot be gods since there is only one god. However, monotheistic assumptions aside, there is no compelling reason to exclude angels from the god category and many reasons to include them.

Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 1:473. The brilliant centerpiece among these citations of archaic poetry is the oracles of Balaam (chapters 23 and 24), which follow the story of Balaam and his she-ass, tracing a cunning network of analogies to it. That story has often been characterized as a folktale, and there are no other instances of talking animals in the historical narratives of the Bible (the only other candidate, the serpent in the Garden story, belongs to the primeval and hence more mythological phase of biblical literature).

Gregory E. Sterling, "Secondary Prefaces and the Composition of Luke Acts," NTS 71 no. 2 (2025), 154-155. How long was the interval between Luke and Acts? We do not have any way to answer this with specificity – just as we cannot speak with confidence about the length of the gap between Philo’s De vita Moysis 1 and 2. It is clear that the author did some additional research as the shift of the time of the ascension makes clear.

YouTube video by Bible and Theology Matters

Rogier Boogaard and Arjan van den Os, "The Angel Strikes: The Sennacherib Narrative in 2 Kings 18-19 as a Background to Herod's Death in Acts 12:20-23, NovT 68 (2026), 45-46. The nature of Herod’s offense is specified at the end of Acts 12:23: “he had not given glory to God” (οὐκ ἔδωκεν τὴν δόξαν τῷ θεῷ). This statement is puzzling at first, because it was the crowd who engaged in idolatrous worship, not Herod.

Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 276. The fate of John and Mark was a form of institutional domestication that had already begun when Matthew and Luke wrote to correct Mark. Jesus was not an incomprehensible mystery even if there is a proper sense of mystery and God's secrets are on the horizon.

A. Andrew Das, "Israel's Scriptures in Galatians," in Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 395-396. Galatians 3:16 quotes exactly what the Scripture "says" (λέγει) in Gen 13:15 LXX as Paul returns to the topic of the plural "sons" of Abraham raised in Gal 3:6-7.

Angela Roskop Erisman, "Numbers," in The SBL Study Bible, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, Kristin De Troyer, and F. Scott Spencer (HarperOne, 2023), 221. Reading the book of Numbers can be a frustrating experience. The early Christian theologian Origen famously encouraged those who come to Scripture's table to "reject it and spit it out" in favor of more palatable fare, such as the book of Genesis, perhaps.

Warren Throckmorton. The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. Broadleaf Books, 2026. Hardcover. $32.99. Pp. ix + 319. ISBN 979-8-8898-3582-0. Introduction In The Christian Past That Wasn’t, retired psychology professor and avid armchair historian Warren Throckmorton gives us a blow-by-blow survey and dismantling of key pseudohistorical arguments advanced by contemporary Christian nationalists. Riveting, accessible, and topical, this book is a gotta-read for anyone interested in the church-state front of the culture wars generally, and the rightwing evangelical distortion and weaponization of U.S.

Paula Fredriksen. Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. Princeton University Press, 2024. Hardcover. $29.95. Pp. 288. ISBN 9780691157696. When I took my first church history class sometime around 2002 at Pensacola Christian College,1 the textbook was written from a dispensationalist perspective wherein the framework for studying Christian history was to be found in Jesus’s letters to the seven churches in Rev.

Peter H. Davids, The Epistle of James, NIGTC (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1982), 57. James is concerned about the testing of faith in situations of economic deprivation. He sees the test made critical by the presence of the evil impulse, the temper within, who answers to the devil without. The setting is the dualistic conflict of Christ and the world/devil.

Jaime Clark Soles, "Israel's Scriptures in John," in Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 300. Woman Wisdom is powerfully alluded to in John. Read the prologue (John 1:1-18) alongside Prov 8:22-31; Sir 24:1-9; and Prov 1:20-33, and John casts Jesus in the mould of Woman Wisdom.

Nicholas J. Moore, "Jude and the Watchers in the Early Church," NovT 68 (2026), 92-93. While 2 Peter offers less explicit engagement with Enochic traditions than does Jude, the wording of 2 Pet 2:4 is striking in establishing a further link with the Watchers tradition. The expression “when the angels sinned” (a genitive absolute, ἀγγέλων ἁμαρτησάντων) is generic and underdetermined, certainly by comparison with Jude, but the location and means of their detention is more specific than in Jude.

Steve A. Wiggins, "First, Kings" (4.1.26), steveawiggins.com. Accessed 4.7.26. Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed. Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem). Alas, poor Uriah. The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.

Note: This will be the final Roundup until September. Between the kids' summer break, vacation, and everything else under the (blazing hot) sun, I don't think I'll have much time to put it together until school starts back in a few months. So, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, have a great summer. For those of you below the equator, good luck!

Kevin M. Levin, "What We Owe the Past" (3.18.26), kevinmlevin.substack.com. Accessed 4.1.26. Future generations will almost certainly look back at us with bewilderment and grief. Perhaps it will be our treatment of animals, raised and slaughtered by the billion in conditions of documented suffering, which we know about and mostly prefer not to think about. Perhaps it will be climate change, not the fact of it, but the years we spent debating it while the window to act narrowed.

"When we use AI to flesh out ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking." - Eve Fairbanks, "The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI," The Atlantic (5.29.26). Dan McClellan looks at "mind-blowing Bible facts" that are not mind-blowing and not facts. Robyn Walsh discusses why so many Christian mss come from Egypt.

Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014), 427. To attempt to explain the world today through the categories of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.

Norman Franklin, "The Story of Naboth's Vineyard and the Ancient Winery in Jezreel" (5.13.17), thetorah.com. Accessed 3.4.26. Evidence from Assyrian texts show that at the same time that Naboth is pictured as tending his grapes (Omride period), Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria is described as having provided 10,000 wineskins at an inaugural party at his new palace in Calah, where he wined and dined 70,000 guests. 

"Temperament is destiny...." - Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Pete Hegseth Exception" (3.9.26), theatlantic.com. Accessed 4.2.26. I am currently reading through the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters and have really enjoyed it. So, I was happy to hear that it is finalist for a Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction. How exciting! Jodi Magness looks back at her career for…

Stephen Young, "Donald Trump's Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical" (2.23.26), religiondispatches.org. Accessed 2.24.26. The Bible gets even darker in its norms for warfare. Deuteronomy’s law code tolerates one exception to the genocide of the conquered: if the vanquished are from a city outside of the promised land, then the women and children can be spared … for enslaving!

"Those you argue against always shape your argument." - Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 8. Over on Facebook, Constantine Campbell linked to a volume he's been working on as editor, namely The Greek New Testament Study Bible. I regularly use my Reader's Greek New Testament and so I'm eager to see what this edition has to offer.

James F. McGrath, The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too (Eerdmans, 2023), 66-67. Once again we have to ask whether Matthew missed the original context […

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-seven of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Ephraim and the Exodus: A Notable Contradiction.”1 I have been a fan of the cartoon The Simpsons for nearly my entire life. My dad didn’t allow us to watch it when I was younger but by the time I was a teenager we would come home from church and watch the latest episode together.

"Jude certainly felt naive when she bowed to pray to her mother's god, as silly as a little girl wishing on shooting stars, dandelions. What could he give her that hadn't already been denied? Strength? Resilience? Mercy, maybe, if such a thing existed." - Yah Yah Scholfield, On Sundays She Picked Flowers (Saga Press, 2026), ch. 1. Robin Walsh asks Mark Goodacre if all the Gospels are hypothetical.

Matthew V. Novenson, Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 56. Rather embarrassingly for Paul’s modern interpreters, the first person in antiquity expressly to attest the motif of “justification from works of the law” turns out to be. . . Paul himself. Its earliest appearance is in Paul’s own rhetoric, not anywhere “in the wild” in Jewish sources prior to Paul.

Jacob A. Lollar, "The Meaning of Ephesians: Competing Christianities in Second-Century Ephesus," NovT 67 (2025), 342. A well-known textual variant exists in the opening line of Ephesians: several early mss lack the inscription ἐν Ἐφέσῳ in the original scribal hand. This variant is particularly noteworthy because, without the address, there is nothing to link this letter specifically to Ephesus. Goodspeed recognized this in the 1930s, saying that the letter “reflects no definite, localized, historical situation which it is intended to meet,” but is rather an amassing of Pauline thought and theology: “it is altogether built up of Pauline materials […] it reads like a commentary on the Pauline epistles.” The missing title is key to the letter and its function: first, it shows there is nothing to explicitly link the letter to Ephesus; second, it reveals important information regarding the date and reception of the letter as “to the Ephesians.”

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, "The Stoic Paradox of James 2.10," NTS 31 no. 4 (Oct. 1985), 616. Even if the recipients of were Jewish Christians rather than Hellenistic ones, as is commonly thought, they should not be supposed ignorant of the basic tenets of Stoicism, or incapable of appreciating their moral application. The dualism which is implicit in both the rabbinical teaching about the transgression of the whole law in one point and the Stoic paradox that he who has one vice has all does not require a similar dichotomization in the scholarly interpretation of James 2.

Joel Christensen, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press, 2025), 13. One of the reasons I am interested in how ChatGPT and similar programs work is that it helps us explore the limits of the analogies provided by Natural Language Processing for the way language and narratives function in our embodied minds. Words on a page are nothing without someone to read them and create their meaning.

Grant Macaskill, "Israel's Scriptures in Early Jewish Literature," in Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 133. Any New Testament scholars who seek to make use of works typically categorized as "early Jewish writings" need to disabuse themselves of naïveté around the provenance of these works.

"'Christianity.' 'The faith.' 'The church.' By using these terms in the singular, we repeat the rhetoric of the retrospectively 'orthodox,' and we obscure the vital variety that always characterized this protean movement." - Paula Fredriksen, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024), 198. Robyn Faith Walsh talks the "real" Paul over at the YouTube channel…

John J. Collins, What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues (Yale University Press, 2019), 212-213. Strictly speaking, the Bible does not mean anything until it is interpreted. Appeal to textual agency ("but the Bible says") is far too simple an evasion of the reader's responsibility. The more important question, however, is whether it is possible to interpret the Bible with a degree of objectivity so that people who approach it with different prejudices and faith commitments can reach consensus.

Joseph G. Allen, "God's λόγος in James and Early Judaism," NovT 67 (2025), 368. [I]t is difficult to read James 1:18 independently of its allusions to God's creation of the world. James's allusions to Genesis 1 in chapter 3 indicate that he is familiar with this portion of Scripture, and James has a penchant for grounding his ethical exhortation in the nature of the created order and humanity's responsibility as creatures.